Jean-François de la Barre

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Jean-François, knight de la Barre (September 12, 1745 - July 1, 1766), was a French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" (a touch added by the Paris Parlement when they confirmed the original sentence from the Abbeville court). It is often said (by Dickens, in "A Tale of Two Cities", among others) that he was executed for not having knelt or removed his hat before a Catholic procession (on the feast of Corpus Christi). In fact the original cause of the inquiry was the mutilation of a cross, a far more serious offence, probably committed by La Barre's friend Gaillard d'Etalonde (who escaped). In France, he is a symbol of Christian religious intolerance, along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven, all championed by Voltaire.

On August 9, 1765, the wooden crucifix on a bridge in Abbeville was vandalized. Catholicism was then the state religion of France and the religion of the vast majority of the French public. The bishop of Amiens is said to have roused the furor of the faithful and asked churchgoers to reveal all they could about the case to the civilian judges, under pain of excommunication; in fact, he came to calm emotions with a ceremony that had the opposite effect. The church was obliged (under secular law) to make the proclamations looking for witnesses. Nobody actually revealed anything about the vandalizing itself, but Du Maisniel de Belleval, a local judge who had quarreled with young La Barre, gathered damaging evidence against a group of friends (possibly not realizing his own son was part of the group). Three young men, Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de La Barre, and Moisnel were accused of not having removed their hats when a procession had passed, but numerous other blasphemies were revealed was well. La Barre's bedroom was searched and among his (mainly pornographic) prohibited books, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was found - providing a pretext to blame the Philosophers for the young men's misbehavior.

(The above is based on Marc Chassaigne's "Le Proces du Chevalier de la Barre" and Max Gallo's "Que Passe La Justice Du Roi", both dedicated to this affair.)

Voltaire, at first horrified by the attention the affair drew to him, ended up defending La Barre's memory and helping d'Etallonde. The sentence was reversed by the National Convention during the French Revolution in 1794.